Okay, all I see on here is negative comments, what ever happened to the concept of "the right tool for the job"? Ruby on Rails is a gem (excuse the pun) in the realm of bioinformatics and chemical informatics. I don't need to be concerned with "scaling" when I am building a site with a maximum of 10 users. For labs and small companies everywhere needing to create and support small or large databases, RoR is fast and easy. It also has major industry backing from the likes of IBM and Apple. It may be a bigger problem for high-volume sites, but I have found it extremely useful. I am using it on the backend (for data management - the data is exported from the database to the legacy perl system daily) for sites like http://www.drugbank.ca/http://www.hmdb.ca/ and on the frontend for sites like http://hmdb.med.ualberta.ca/foodb/.
It is actually a draft list of what is believed to comprise the metabolome (the FooDB food component database and DrugBank are part of the Human Metabolome). And with each compound the associated enzymes are given, as well as reactions.
I should have clarified a bit more, but this is truly a draft map of the human metabolome. The database catalogues not just the chemical data but also concentrations of the metabolites in specific disorders, as well as providing spectral data. The metabolome data actually is gigabytes. The idea is that a doctor can take a urine, blood, or CSF sample, and compare the concentrations of each metabolite in the given biofluid to the known concentrations for normal and abnormal patients available at the HMDB. Although you can't do this yet, making the data available to the scientific community might enable this type of diagnosis. Some would argue the medical implications will be just as great as that of the human genome project, while others argue it is insignificant. Only time will tell.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, all I see on here is negative comments, what ever happened to the concept of "the right tool for the job"? Ruby on Rails is a gem (excuse the pun) in the realm of bioinformatics and chemical informatics. I don't need to be concerned with "scaling" when I am building a site with a maximum of 10 users. For labs and small companies everywhere needing to create and support small or large databases, RoR is fast and easy. It also has major industry backing from the likes of IBM and Apple. It may be a bigger problem for high-volume sites, but I have found it extremely useful. I am using it on the backend (for data management - the data is exported from the database to the legacy perl system daily) for sites like http://www.drugbank.ca/ http://www.hmdb.ca/ and on the frontend for sites like http://hmdb.med.ualberta.ca/foodb/.
Yes, concentration information contains data on Male/Female when available (when literature specified it or if it was done in-house).
It is actually a draft list of what is believed to comprise the metabolome (the FooDB food component database and DrugBank are part of the Human Metabolome). And with each compound the associated enzymes are given, as well as reactions.
I should have clarified a bit more, but this is truly a draft map of the human metabolome. The database catalogues not just the chemical data but also concentrations of the metabolites in specific disorders, as well as providing spectral data. The metabolome data actually is gigabytes. The idea is that a doctor can take a urine, blood, or CSF sample, and compare the concentrations of each metabolite in the given biofluid to the known concentrations for normal and abnormal patients available at the HMDB. Although you can't do this yet, making the data available to the scientific community might enable this type of diagnosis. Some would argue the medical implications will be just as great as that of the human genome project, while others argue it is insignificant. Only time will tell.